1. Field
The disclosure relates to a method, system, and article of manufacture for resource management for data storage services.
2. Background
A storage manager, such as, the Tivoli* Storage Manager* (TSM) product marketed by International Business Machines (IBM*) Corporation, may be used for securely storing and backing up data. The storage manager may execute in a storage management server, such as, a TSM server, and assure data integrity and provide the ability to protect business critical data in the event of hardware, software and environmental failures. The storage manager may maintain an image of the data and programs on tape cartridges or other storage medium. In the event of a system failure or other events that result in a loss of data, the storage manager may be used to restore the data and programs from the tape cartridges or other storage medium. *IBM, Tivoli, and Tivoli Storage Manager are trademarks or registered trademarks of IBM Corporation.
The TSM may provide data storage services to clients for backup, archive, or space management of data. The TSM server may store files sent to the TSM server by one or more TSM clients. The data from the TSM clients may be stored on storage media, such as, disks, tape volumes, etc., within a storage hierarchy defined by a system administrator.
Storage media within the storage hierarchy may be grouped to form storage pools. Data being stored from a client to a server is directed to a primary storage pool based within the storage hierarchy. Once the data has been stored in the storage hierarchy, a copy can be made for the purposes of creating a backup of the data. The backup data is created in a copy storage pool. It is possible to create more than one copy of the backup data in different copy storage pools. The system administrator may either manually or through a scheduled event begin backing up the data to a tape copy storage pool. This copy of the data is used for restoring data in the event of a data loss within the storage hierarchy. The administrator may also create a second copy in yet another copy storage pool and transport the tape that includes the second copy of the data to a remote site for storing safely.
The amount of time it takes to backup data to a copy storage pool may be significant and certain clients may not be able to perform a complete backup at the time of writing data. Backups may occur at a later time, such as, during the night, within a certain period of time referred to as the backup window. To reduce the backup window and allow clients to complete backups, TSM provides a feature called simultaneous write.
In simultaneous write, the system administrator defines one or more copy storage pools corresponding to a primary storage pool. This allows for data entering the storage hierarchy to be concurrently written to a primary storage pool and one or more associated copy storage pools. Resources such as disk space, tape drives, tapes, etc., are allocated at the beginning of the storage operation and may remain allocated during the entire storage operation.